# Big strings => panic

Brandon Gillespie (brandon@tombstone.sunrem.com)
Fri, 19 Apr 1996 13:28:26 PDT

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    On Fri, 19 Apr 1996, Matthew Sanderson wrote:
    > Granted; would it then be possible to degrade slightly more gracefully,
    > such as kill the huge task, rather than panicking? Malloc fails, kill the
    > MOO task, sort of thing. I don't see that a server panic is either
    > necessary or desirable or unavoidable in this situation.
    > Although I realise it's a danger one has to live with, it would be really
    > nice if giving someone a progbit did not give that person the power to
    > panic the MOO. 1.8.0's task-quotas is a solution to the problem of
    > forkbombs... but this problem remains (and some others).

    not without a lot of odd heuristics munged througout your code.  How do
    you know if its a malloc panic from somebody creating a non-important
    string which can be trashed versus some other possible (more
    dangerous) problem?  Sure you can simply kill any running tasks when a
    panic is received, but that is just as bad (if not worse) in behaviour
    than simply panic'ing and shutting down, and its not even guarantee'd to
    solve the problem!

    -Brandon Gillespie-